Mr. Pedro Santos, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Akamai Technologies analyzes in TravelDailyNews how travel & tourism companies can benefit from the new online technologies in a highly competitive e-environment.

TravelDailyNews: How can travel & tourism companies add real value to their online traffic?

Pedro Santos: Real value comes not only from adding web 2.0 functionality such as user generated content, video, and rich internet applications like AJAX, Dynamic HTML, and Macromedia Flex but also by optimizing site response times as the site content gets richer, more interactive, and takes longer to load in the browser.

TDN: How is the user-generated content going to change the traditional channels of communication between business and consumers and what new techniques are being offered?

P. S.: User-generated content mainly impacts travel guide sites. Travel guide suites that can offer user-generated content capabilities along with a seamless end user experience will benefit most.

TDN: Social media are more and more a hot issue. How are these going to benefit tourism companies on their online strategy?

P. S.: Although social media puts pressure on traditional tourism companies, travelers are increasingly turning to their peers as a valued research source and encourage travel marketers to join them in this dialogue.

TDN: Can tourism companies increase their direct online sales in a highly competitive environment and how?

P. S.: If tourism companies continue to focus on the fact that consumer is more and more in control (over things like destination planning and price) and can cater their technology and site experience based on this trend, they can differentiate in this competitive environment.

TDN: How does your company facilitate the online business for travel companies? Are we going to see any new products from Akamai?

P. S.: Akamai accelerates the response times not only for B2C travel sites with the Dynamic Site Accelerator product but also speeds up the interface between the booking agent and the travel company (airline, hotel, online agent, etc.) with its Web Application Accelerator product. Dynamic Site Accelerator and Web Application Accelerator are two of the newest products in Akamai’s portfolio for travel companies.

TDN: What are the key drivers for an efficient online platform that will optimize revenues? What are the major problems that travel content websites face today?

P. S.: Site performance and site scalability continue to be core issues for growing travel providers. According to a recent study by Jupiter research, online consumers will wait no more than 4 seconds for a web page to load in a browser – if it takes longer than 4 seconds, 33% will abandon and go a competing site. With the consumer in control, travel content providers need to make the user experience as fast and as reliable as possible.